Gamasutra - Julian Gollop Interview

Gamasutra interviews Julian Gollop to talk about his long career in the games industry. For those of you who don't know who he is shame on you he created the X-Com games.

For 23 years, game designer Julian Gollop worked for himself, and created what he wanted. After spending six years at Ubisoft creating games for other people, he's now ready to get back to doing it for himself again.

Gollop is the very definition of a video game industry veteran. The British designer started out creating tabletop strategy games for Games Workshop, before moving on to strategy games on the ZX Spectrum, the Amiga, Amstrad, Commodore 64, and eventually the Windows PC.

His credentials include creating the X-COM series, while also founding Mythos Games and Codo Technologies. In 2006 he decided to join up with Ubisoft, and lead a team to create the under-appreciated Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars for the Nintendo 3DS.

But after work was completed on Assassin's Creed III: Liberation, Gollop decided he'd had enough. "I wanted to get back to making the games that I'm actually good at making and I am interested in making," he tells me. "I did manage to make a cool turn-based strategy while at Ubisoft, but it seemed that I would be unlikely to make such a game again if I remained there."